Do football clubs have ideology? If so, who decides which one it is? In Spain, for example, Fútbol Club Barcelona and Real Madrid are repeatedly identified with two very different models of society. The rivalry goes far beyond sports. Dictators and politicians realized long ago the strength of football and decided to turn the most powerful clubs into ambassadors of their ideas, values or desires.
“Football in Spain is many other things. The favorite sport-spectacle of the masses, polarizer of interregional tensions and ultranational projections, football is an indispensable piece for the total understanding of thirty years of the History of Spain”, said Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as early as 1973. The journalist and writer was one of the first intellectuals to naturally accept his passion for football and turn it into a vehicle to explain reality. The book Vázquez Montalbán, football and politics (Base), offers a complete, rigorous, fun and educational review of the Montalbanian perspective. Its author, Jordi Osúa Quintana, has a doctorate in Sports Sciences for a thesis on the sports thinking of the Catalan writer.
Osúa proposes a journey that starts with the relationship between Barcelona and Montalbán’s political militancy and later analyzes the use of football by the leaders —both in totalitarian regimes and in democracies—. He raises the analogy of clubs as substitutes for political participation and delves into the mutual transfers between the two areas. Always with the magic of football present, making it possible for someone who considered Barça to be “the symbolic unarmed army of Catalanity” could see himself one day helping Butragueño symbolically protect a ball while watching a match of the Spanish team on television.